Page 71 of A Killing Frost

“I was right,” I said.

She nodded, biting her lip. “You were right, and I couldn’t see it. His magic has always been greater than my own.”

“Makes sense,” I said, and held my hand out to her. “Please?”

She understood what I was asking and produced the small glass bottle from inside her shirt. When she removed the cork, my pigeon forced its way through the opening and flew unerringly back to me, disappearing into my chest. The last traces of her spelldissolved, like cotton candy in the rain, and I returned my attention to Officer Thornton—to Oberon.

“I got you home,” I said. “You were lost in Annwn, and I got you home.”

His smile was like the rising sun, radiant and bright and almost too much to look at directly. “You know me now,” he said. “You didn’t before.”

“We’ve been playing pass-the-curse around to make sure someone found you; it was my turn to have no idea who I was in the world or who loved me until I brought you home,” I explained. I still felt a little light-headed, but it was easier if I didn’t try to emotionally engage with what was happening, and if I didn’t look at Tybalt.

The Luidaeg seemed to feel the same way, minus the not looking at Tybalt part. She was still standing in the same place, not approaching her father, even though she must have been aching to put her arms around him and demand that he never leave again.

“Are you really...?” I asked, as delicately as I could. He had to be: the Luidaeg’s magic is never wrong, and the curse that kept me from seeing my own way home even when it was right in front of me had started to lift as soon as he’d entered the room. And the Babylon candle I’d bartered from her as part of learning to give Simon my way home was a bonfire now, too bright to be anything but reacting to its purpose.

He shook his head, running a hand through his hair, an achingly familiar gesture that I remembered copying from my mother when I was too small to understand that no amount of pretending would turn me into the daughter she wanted me to be.

“Not quite,” he said. “Not yet. You have to say the words if you want me to be. But you brought me home, and you came here looking for me, and so I came to you.”

“What words?” I looked into his brown, perfectly human eyes, and saw no answers there. Behind him, the Luidaeg shook her head, expression helpless. She didn’t know either.

But the key to his location had been in Evening’s taunting reminder of what he’d said when I first pulled him out of Annwn, believing him to be a human man in need of saving. “Lady, let alone,” he’d said to me, in a dirty San Francisco alleyway. Why, unless he’d looked at me and seen my grandmother, the woman who’d borne his youngest daughter, the one who’d been instrumental,however accidentally, in the loss of his wives? No one had ever claimed Oberon had been kidnapped. Everything I’d ever heard had implied he left of his own free will, taking the time to put his affairs in order before walking calmly away.

And going into hiding, it seemed. It made sense. If his daughter could make herself seem so human that magic couldn’t tell what she was, why couldn’t he? The Three were supposed to be as much more powerful than their children as their children were than the rest of us, which was a horrifying thought. We were standing in the Luidaeg’s living room with a physical god, and I was casting around for the keys that would unlock the prison he’d placed himself in.

Simon hadn’t moved since Officer Thornton stepped into the room. I wasn’t even sure he was breathing. He was just staring at the man, eyes wide and jaw slack, a look of profound confusion and dismay on his face. He looked like a man who’d just lost everything, which didn’t make sense, since he had his way home back, and now he was going to get to keep it. I guess meeting the father-in-law for the first time is terrible for everyone.

I shivered as I offered my hands to Officer Thornton, resisting the urge to turn and run across the room, throw myself into Tybalt’s arms, and never think about any of this ever again. I was a hero. I had finally come to accept that. Being a hero didn’t mean I was equipped to handle actual gods.

But someone had to. And even if the spell was broken, the Luidaeg was standing lost and silent, waiting for someone to finish the process of bringing her father back to her. He slid his hands into mine, and they felt perfectly ordinary, perfectly human, like there was nothing strange about any of this. The heat from the Babylon candle was warming our skins, and we shared the same physical space, man and grandchild, as ourselves, for the first time.

“Tam Lin” didn’t quite feel like the answer. Maybe the ballad told the story of how my grandparents met, but Oberon wasn’t part of the narrative as it had been written down. Still, it was what we had, and if he was looking for something specific from me, I couldn’t imagine what else it would be. Maybe with a little alteration, it would work. “I forbid,” I said, voice low and level, “you maidens all who wear gold in your hair to come or go by Caughterha, for Oberon is there. And none shall go by Caughterha but they leave him a pledge, either their rings or mantles green or else...” I tapered off.Somehow, the idea of looking my grandfather in the eye and saying the word “maidenhead” was just a step too far for me.

Thankfully, the Luidaeg was there to pick up the slack. “Ye shall no sooner be entered into that wood, if ye go that way, he will find the manner to speak with you, and if ye speak to him, ye are lost forever. And ye shall ever find him before you, so that it shall be in manner impossible that ye can scape from him without speaking to him, for his words be so pleasant to hear that there is no mortal man that can well scape without speaking to him. And if he see that ye will not speak a word to him, then he will be sore displeased with you, and ere ye can get out of the wood he will cause rain and wind, hail and snow, and will make marvelous tempests with thunder and lightnings, so that it shall seem to you that all the world should perish, and he shall make to seem before you a great running river, black and deep.” She stopped to take a breath, and added, “The Book of Huon de Bordeaux, John Bourchier.”

As the Luidaeg spoke, Officer Thornton stood up straighter and straighter, and he changed. It was a subtle thing at first, a lengthening of the spine and a shedding of what seemed to be layer upon layer of weariness. Then the subtlety melted away, and with it, his humanity.

Antlers sprouted from his brow, many-pointed as an ancient stag’s, brown as weathered bone. They didn’t bleed. There was no velvet to soften or gentle them, but as they reached what I assumed was their full span, flowers bloomed along their points, small and white and smelling strongly of a forest’s sweetness. The part of my magic responsible for recognizing and cataloging smells couldn’t put a name to them. Maybe they were something that only existed when Oberon did.

His eyes remained brown but grew darker, irises spreading to devour his sclera, pupils dwindling until they were a dot of black amidst the layered brown. Predator’s eyes. His ears shifted as well, growing sharply pointed before elongating, becoming as flexible and responsive as a stag’s.

His body didn’t change in any measurable way. I suppose it would have made a certain sense for him to have the lower body of a stag, given the rest of him, but how could Faerie have wasted so much time and energy hating anyone they viewed as bestial if their forefather had been a beast himself? I’m sure we would havefound a way—the fae are nothing if not self-contradictory—but it would have required effort, and purebloods tend to also be profoundly lazy.

The bones of his face shifted under his skin, until he looked like the same man and not the same man at all, humanity replaced by something impossibly beautiful, impossibly feral, glorious and terrifying. Looking at him felt the way looking at my mother used to feel, back when I was so much closer to human. I would have collapsed if he hadn’t been holding tightly to my hands, blunt claws denting the skin without breaking it.

“Lady, let alone,” he said, and smiled radiantly, showing me the razor points of his incisors. Then he let me go, and Ididfall, or began to. Simon was there to catch me, wrapping his arms around my waist and giving me something to lean against. Together, we watched in silence as the lost King of Faerie turned to face his daughter. The Babylon candle guttered out, its purpose finally fulfilled, and the room was suddenly cold.

The Luidaeg bit her lip as she stepped toward him, black tears escaping from her eyes and running down her cheeks. They left tarry streaks behind, like she was crying off her mascara, but she was actually weeping the color out of her irises, leaving them driftglass green and clearer than I’d ever seen them.

“Daddy?” she asked, in a voice that was barely bigger than a whisper. It shook on the second syllable, breaking.

“Hello, my little Annie,” he said, turning to face her, and then he took her into his arms and held her against his chest while she wept into the white tank top that had carried over from his time as Officer Thornton. The fabric drank her tears, and it, too, changed, becoming a doublet of rough brown velvet over a long-sleeved poet’s shirt. She couldn’t possibly have cried enough to transform his sweatpants, but they grew tighter and more fitted, becoming simple brown breeches. He didn’t need any ornamentation. He was Oberon, crowned in horn and flower. That was enough.

That had always been enough.

Simon made a choked sound, loosening his grasp on me. I pulled away before Oberon could look my way again and root me to the floor, flinging myself into the open space between me and the person who needed me most in all the world.

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